Page 100 of Secret Gifts
This is what I expected when I woke up.
“Not my fault,” he whispers, but I know my mother heard.
She stalks back in, and then I notice her cheeks really are streaked. She really was crying. What the hell?
“Mom,” I mumble while standing up and clutching the sheet to me. “I’m sorry. I was just trying to get healed. I fell asleep shortly after.”
I accidentally smile, and I look back to a blushing Jase who drops his eyes the second my mother lets a breath escape.
“Oh,” she murmurs while looking around, her eyes finally taking in the destruction I’ve caused.
The tables are in shambles with slivers of wood all over the marble floors. The steel door to the bedroom has been warped, and it’s still gasping out its pain each time it swings back or forth. The stained, ripped, and singed sheets reveal secrets of our torrid tousle, and the cracked walls only add to the scandalous tale.
Her feet crunch on shattered and scattered glass from the balcony door as she moves over to the chair where Jase once sat. She stifles a grin when she sees a bit of ceiling mounded up in the floor beside it.
“I see your gift is getting stronger,” she says with a bit of menace in her tone.
Only when I taste Jase’s blood.
He strangles out a cough and then shakes his head, wishing he could scold me right now. He’s fully back with me now, and I breathe out a sigh of relief to know my mother hasn’t scared him away.
“Tell me what happened,” she says a little calmer.
Um... yeah. Right.
“We were caught up in a fight after a tracker read the trail wrong. I got shot, hurt, and then they tried to take me as a prisoner of war,” I mutter very matter-of-factly, omitting several very key pieces to the puzzle.
Her eyes wince, and I know it’s because her biggest fear is someone doing to me what they did to her.
“Someone saved me and delivered me back to the others once it was safe. I swear it’s not as bad as it might have sounded.”
Jase moves to pull me back into bed, and his arms tighten around me because he knows the truth, as opposed to the downplayed version of what I just gave my mother. She’d do the same if the roles were reversed.
She takes in a new breath as though it’s the first one she has taken easily in hours. I do feel a little guilty, but I thought Rex was going to handle her.
“Did Rex not fill you in?” I muse.
“He tried to, but I thought he was lying to keep me from seeing how bad off you were. You always use diluted, packaged blood, so I assumed it must have been terrible for you to use… fresh blood.”
Her lips turn up in a wry smile, and I swear my mother is blushing because of something I did. This is something that has never happened.
Crap. I can’t tell her I just wanted to use fresh blood.
Jase hides his smile behind my hair as he kisses the back of my head, and his hands slide up and down my arms as my Uncle Brazen returns.
“There are… um… some men outside for you… Jase,” he says awkwardly, his eyes darting nervously around the room.
I’m sure he’s still reeling from the safety hazard our room has become.
Jase’s eyes meet his, and then he kisses my head before climbing out of the bed and grabbing a crisp white shirt. He disappears into the bathroom, and emerges almost just as quickly, looking fully refreshed with his shirt tucked in, tie on, and shoes on as well.
Damn you’re fast.
He smirks, and then walks out of the warped door to disappear outside the suite.
“Do you feel better now that you see I’ve healed?” I ask Mom.
“Yes, and now that I see why you were otherwise engaged,” she teases while letting a pile of ceiling dust slide through her fingers.
